I have the disks, but I'm waiting for User2 to get an external SATA caddy, so I can read them. They hope to have one this week. If anyone can lend me one, it would speed things up. But I only have time to do this stuff at the weekends.

Sweet. Are you around at all at the weekend? I'm doing stuff on Saturday afternoon, and I'll probably be at the Cameo Sunday afternoon. But apart from that. I could have a go at doing it there and then. I don't know what state the drives are in.

If any of the drives is thought to be dying, then there may be a limited opportunity to get stuff off it before it goes completely. I would suggest that instead of just firing it up and searching around for the files you want, you prepare a second disk with enough space to copy everything, and then just take an image of the whole disk in one go. So it only has to spin up and seek slowly across the disk once.

I had planned to do this onto the disks for the new fileserver, until they got nicked...

I also have a caddy but I don't know if I'll be around at the weekend.

500 gigs. Fuck. I probably don't have that much space in one place. How old is that disk? A huge SATA disk that is a few years old must have cost a fortune. And it can't have been that old when it started playing up.

I should invest in a terabyte or two, but not right now.

Should I borrow your external drive, Duncan? Or would it make more sense to pass on the disks to you? Will you need to borrow Mike's cables? I suppose it depends who has more time? I'm happy either way.

Must be the 500G WD that was the dodgy one. Almost definitely nowhere near full. Hadn't even partitioned the whole thing when it started misbehaving. Unless someone else did which was unlikely at the time.

And not so old, it was still quite new when all the office shifting happened.

I would take the disks and do it myself, but (don't shoot me) I don't have a Linux setup at the moment and Martin's dd image rip sounds like the best way to go.

Small team effort I reckon would be best. Is Sunday tea time still good ?

Cool. Sunday teatime is good. I'll be at the Cameo double bill before then, and come straight to the Forest. I'll bring a Linux laptop and the dodgy disks. With Mike's cable and Duncan's external disk and Martin's advice, what can go wrong?

Yes, annoyingly, it was Duncan's macbook that saved the day, managing to read a partition that my Linux netbook couldn't. So, Duncan should have a copy of everything from these 2 disks. I had to leave, but not before we'd found something called fisheywives.com, which may be what Mikey and Tim were after.